July 27, 2016 588.2-608.9 20.7 Miles Awake before dawn, and already a thick clay odor like the soil is baking. Skin sticking to nylon, remnants of a long-evaporated sweat. Guzzle water, but wetness barely grazes the mouth and only as it passes; all is sandpaper and paste a moment later. I am dried out to the cell. A throbbing headache constrains my motion, but I force myself up and begin packing. This is as cool as the day is going to get. Hiking moves blood and water around to depetrify tissues slowly. Stiff muscles warm and relax, tongue and throat moisten, the dull aching in my head subsides. I gradually emerge from a zombie plod into a living stroll. The constricted half-meter square in front of my feet dissolves into the boundless half-light pre-dawn desert. Windmills spin whimsically in the rising light like pinwheels in a row. Stars twinkle out like birthday candles granting wishes. I awaken to my place in the world, here, now. This alive presence is only temporary, but it is the reason I come out here. Unlike the routine, repetitive days in civilization that are easily forgotten, out here every day counts. When I return to that other world months from now, this will be a reminder of what life can be and a caution against mindlessness. Can I bring this feeling back to the city? To a house? To a job? The sun comes up and with it, it seems, another ten degrees. I follow a dirt road for miles through scrub brush and manzanita. It winds up, down, and around hills aimlessly and endlessly. I can never see very far ahead because the manzanita reaches above my head, but it seems like the sun finds its way to zenith almost immediately and stays there most of the day, so the high bushes bring no benefit of shade. In the afternoon I pass a small cabin off the side of the dirt road. It looks lived in, but there is no one to be seen. It serves primarily as a reminder that I have not seen a living soul since the bus driver dropped me at the trailhead yesterday. A few minutes later I pass rocks arranged in the dirt to mark mile 600. I wonder how many miles I’ve actually hiked at this point. I've skipped around so often that I can't keep track. I feel a pang of guilt that I haven’t yet hiked past the 500-mile marker, and due to the fire, I probably won’t this season (in fact, it will be almost two years before I finally pass that milestone) Two more miles brings me to a spur trail to my next water source—Robin Bird Spring. It's late afternoon now, but I didn’t want to stop for lunch before I got to water. If this is dry, I still have a liter and a half. It probably won't be enough to get me to the next one without a few waterless miles, but I probably won't die. As I approach the first greenery that I have seen in days, a blur of sandy fur races toward me. Before I can make sense of what I see, wings explode up and away, and the streak pulls up short. A bobcat has just barely missed her prey—a gray dove—possibly because I startled her mid-attack. The prey is forgotten. The bobcat watches me warily for a moment, then scurries away to a safe distance. She's a beautiful, powerful creature, sculpted with muscle and sinew. My wits return after a moment and I scramble to take a picture with my phone as she watches me from tall grasses. The camera is insufficient and only captures a couple pixels of her before she darts away again, out of sight. The spring is flowing freely and it only takes me a few seconds to fill my water bag this time. I filter and drink deliciously cold water while I sit in the shade of a large tree. I soak my bandanna and wash my face, then soak it again and lay it around my neck. It’s such a relief from the heat that my eyes begin to water. I stay for close to an hour, eating lunch, splashing water on myself, and cautiously watching the brush in case of the bobcat’s return. Is this what it would be like, I wonder, not for the first time, if I were the last human on the earth? The early evening brings more trees and relief from the heat. I pass several seasonal water sources, all bone dry, and a few barbed-wire fences, each of which has a trail register. I check and find Goat, Earthcake, Sprinkler, and a variety of even more temporary friends who I have met along the way. It strengthens me, finding the names of friends here. I hike faster as if it will help me to catch up to them. It won’t, of course: those friends are long gone, and in a couple days I will take a week away from the trail.
In the evening I take another spur trail to a final water source and an empty campground. The water is flowing heavily into a trough. I fill up and then find a campsite on the fringes, nestled between trees. I prepare a Knorr's side for dinner and then climb into my tent just as dusk begins to fall.
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July 26, 2016 Mile 566.5-588.2 21.7 miles A small diner on main street serves me an early breakfast. For the first time in 2 days, I am around people. A couple at an adjacent booth asks me questions about my hike. It feels difficult to talk, but I am grateful for the chance to interact with other humans. I don't realize it yet, but I will only talk to one person over the next four days, and that will be brief and awkward. I rush to pack up at the motel room; I want to pick up some pop tarts at the grocery store before my bus comes. I still have two beers left, so I drink one and stuff the other in my backpack. It's a little early in the day for drinking, but I don’t want to throw it away and I don’t want to have to carry all that weight through the desert. All the water I have to carry will be heavy enough. Besides, I don’t have to drive today, or go to work, or even interact with anyone who will judge me for drinking in the morning. I pick up pop tarts and a couple other high-calorie snacks at the grocery store and wander over to the bus stop. It looks like I have a couple minutes until the bus comes, so I pop open my other beer. Just then an elderly lady comes up and sits on the bench. She eyes my beer can suspiciously. I feel a little guilty, and then I don’t. Drinking a beer in public might be illegal, but there's nothing immoral about it and it's none of her business. The bus turns the corner and I chug the rest of the beer before I board and toss the can into an overflowing garbage can. The old lady and I are the only people on the bus, which is headed down the hill to Mojave. I pay the bus driver and ask him to make a special stop at the PCT trailhead. No problem, he says. I settle into a hard plastic seat, overfull from breakfast, with a contented buzz from coffee and beer. The trip takes about fifteen minutes, and then I am standing at the side of a freeway offramp, unmoored once again from civilized society. I stand listlessly for a moment to gather it all in. Just past the asphalt, litter collects in the branches of dead bushes. There is nobody to care for this place, to see that it is tended and clean and safe. It is not a place intended for human beings, but simply a place for their vehicles to pass through. It is a wasteland, neither wilderness nor civilization. I find that I dislike it very much. I cross the freeway on an overpass and exit the wasteland through a chain-link fence. A metal box with a hinged top sits atop a waist-high ledge next to the trail. It holds a trail register. Trail friends who passed through here before I met them will have written their names here. It feels like I have stepped backwards in time, and I am eager to find the old notes of Sprinkler, Goat, Earthcake. As I reach out to lift the lid, something moves in the shadows beneath the box. I yank my hand back before I’m even conscious that it’s a snake. I decide not to look through this trail register. The trail follows a levy next to the freeway for a bit. Last year, there were huge mudslides near here that flooded part of a major freeway and took it out of commission. With no river to hold back, that’s got to be the reason this levy is here. A police SUV pulls over a semi on the other side freeway. I walk toward it at first, and then the trail drops off the levy, through the sandy desert wasteland, and up switchbacks into the mountain. Each time I look down at the freeway I feel like a voyeur, watching a minor drama play out. I've already climbed a fair distance when the semi and the police SUV depart. I come over the top of the mountain and take a break in a bivy site under a joshua tree, one of the few in the area. The landscape is otherwise barren, just short dead grasses and colorless shin-high shrubs. The heat is already draining me, and I start to have serious doubts about water. I'm going through it fast. Seven liters usually gets me through two days, but I'm not sure it will even get me through all of today. The next source is 16 miles away. The water report says it was almost dry three weeks ago, which is the last time anyone updated it. After that there are two more water sources, each about 15 miles apart, and then a long, 45-mile stretch without any natural sources. Sometimes trail angels cache water for hikers in that stretch, but it’s risky to depend on that. Especially now, when every sane hiker is long past this section. Are the trail angels even replenishing the caches this late in the season? I follow a ridgeline for miles. The shrubs get taller and thicker, but they are still only waist high and provide no shade. I fall into a walking coma and landscape passes by as a smudge. Rows of windmills, distant views of nothing, jeep tracks. These blot onto my consciousness as brief impressions, temporary realities. My legs carry on by momentum, nothing more. Eventually some trees provide some relief from the sun, but not from the heat In the afternoon I wind around a hill, hopeful about the spring that is marked on my map. Golden Oaks spring. I am down to one liter and the next water is another 15 miles. I have already hiked 17, although I have almost no memory of it. I need this spring to flow. I cross a jeep track and down into a clearing. There, lying in front of the horse trough where the spring must feed, is one of the biggest black bulls I have ever seen. It stares at me and swats flies with its tail. Lying down it is almost as tall as me. This is not an animal I want to have a confrontation with. I pause to consider my options. I could wait it out, but who knows how long that would be. It looks like it's been here most of the day and has no intention of leaving anytime soon. I could go around it, but that wouldn't get me any closer to the water; the cow is right there, next to the trough. I could skip this spring and go to the next one, which would make a 32 mile day in oppressive heat. If that spring is dry, it would really leave me in a situation. No, that's not really an option. Maybe if I try to scare the bull off. It probably won’t charge me, right? I station myself near a tree and shout at it. It just sits there, glaring at me with wide eyes. I shout again, and it snorts and looks away, uncowed. Nothing. I steel myself for the inevitable and walk forward. When I reach twenty feet, its head whips back to me, eyes fixed in some emotion between terror and wrath. I can only hope flight wins out over fight. I pause, proceed. At fifteen feet the bull huffs in annoyance and shakes its head, then returns to a hot glare. Pause, proceed. Ten feet. It shudders and rises, like a leviathan from the deep. Flies explode off its back. I plant my feet and hold my hiking poles like spears, but the bull is bolting away, plowing huge clods of dirt underfoot as it goes. The horse trough has a small puddle of scummy water filled with flies, yellow jackets, and mosquitoes, alive and dead. A PVC pipe is there to direct the spring, but there is no flow, only drops of water, like a leaky faucet. It will be slow, but it is enough. I take out my foldable bucket and hang it over the pipe to collect the drops. I open my book and sit against the horse trough to read and wait.
Twenty minutes later the bucket has collected enough water to pump. Uncap dirty bag. Pour bucket into bag. Screw on filter. Uncap filter. Uncap waterbottle. Set caps together on a rock, face up. Place filter in waterbottle. Squeeze. It's a ritual as automatic as brushing one's teeth. Except without anything else to distract me, my mind stays fully present. I feel the creases in the plastic dirty bag, the cool wetness of the drops that fell on the outside of the bag. I hear the crinkle of the plastic, the squirt of water into my bottle. I smell the sour rotting of dead insects and cow shit and even the oppressive heat that pushes against me from every direction, that has a smell too. I experience the freedom and loneliness of my unique place in the world, out here in this wasteland that has been relegated, since there is little else to exploit, to cattle country and wind extraction. Another twenty minutes and I have a second liter. In exchange for its water, the trough demands its pound of flesh—hours of my life. I am impatient but not idiotic; I remain at the spring for nearly three hours, collecting life-saving water drop by drop, filtering it, and resting my weary legs. When I finally exit this blight of earth the sun has retreated to a lower angle. There are trees, and shade. I round a hillside to find the bull again, lying in the middle of the trail. It seems the guardian of the spring is not done with me yet. This time I try to go around, but the second I step off the trail, the bull bolts again, further down the trail. I follow it, nervous that flight will turn to fight at any moment, but with nowhere else to go. It bolts a second time, then a third, then finally leaves the trail on the downhill slope. It watches me as I pass above it. I watch it, too, for signs of aggression, and I try to speak comfortingly as I go. It bolts one more time for good measure, turning down and away, and I can finally break into full stride. I end my day only a few miles later, sapped of energy, sapped of moisture. Lucky you (well, maybe). You get to sit in on one of my music appreciation classes that I don't teach anymore. And unlike my music appreciation classes, I’ll teach this whole thing in only one lesson, rather than taking half of the first semester. (Attendance is not required, so feel free to bow out now. I’ll take questions at the end.) In the process, I'll likely slay some sacred cows, so if you disagree with my low opinion of a particular artist, it doesn't mean that you have poor taste, it just means we're likely listening for different things. Nonetheless, I think that the more you can listen for, the more interesting music becomes, just like someone who knows the rules of baseball will enjoy a game more than someone who doesn’t (not that music has “rules” per se, but there are certain conventions that apply to different styles).
Begin lecture. Fuzzy Red Dogs Play Tinker Toys. The above phrase is a mnemonic I made up to help remember the six listening categories (which I adapted from composer Aaron Copland’s “How to Listen to Music”). These categories are how musicians tend to hear music, even if they aren't fully aware of it. Paying attention to each category individually will help you get at more of the music. When a piece of music is interesting, it's usually because the composer has set up expectations in one or more of these categories and then broken them, which I’ll talk about more at the end. The mnemonic stands for Form, Rhythm, Dynamics, Pitch, Timbre, and Texture. -F: Form: The structure of the piece. What repeats itself, what's new, and what’s a variation on old material? Most pop music follows a simple form similar to verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. For most listeners, form is the hardest to hear, in part because it takes focused attention over a period of time. But it often brings the greatest rewards, too. Pink Floyd's "The Wall" brings back some themes in unexpected places in the album, two of the most obvious being when "We don't need no education" reappears in the bass line several times throughout the album, and how the same children's chorus opens and closes the album. -R: Rhythm: How is time divided? The beat, yes, but also the groupings of beats, the division of beats, etc. If you're listening for rhythm, you might recognize that the main hook of Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya’ comes from a regular 4-beat grouping that is suddenly interrupted by a 2-beat grouping, which plays with your expectations in a satisfying way. This is a great example of how a musician would hear it without noticing it, because they have such an internalized feeling for beat grouping. But a non-musician can hear it too if they're paying attention to the rhythm. To use another PInk Floyd example, “Money” is in lopsided groups of 7 (or 4+3, depending on how you feel it) until the chorus relaxes briefly into a steady, consistent 4 (last Pink Floyd example, I promise). -D: Dynamics: Louds and softs. Easy to notice and they add easy variety. In a car radio, the engine covers the softs, and since most people listen to music in the car now, there's not a lot of dynamics in pop music. But it still exists in movie scores, classical music, and jazz. -P: Pitch: The notes. We usually divide this into melody (the part you sing) and harmony (the chords). Most people just listen to the melody, but you can instantly get more out of music by just directing your attention to the other things that are happening. There’s a whole rabbit hole to go down here, but I’ll just add a couple other oversimplified considerations: dissonance vs. consonance (unpleasant vs. pleasant sounding, tension and resolution, conjunct (stepwise) and disjunct (jumping around) melodies. Laura Marling’s album ‘Semper Femina’ was a huge creative leap forward for her because her melodies suddenly became more disjunct without losing their line. The Beatles were especially good at interweaving conjunct melodies that were easy to follow with unexpected harmonies that surprised and delighted. Weezer’s “Miss Sweeney” strips the melody of the verse down to a single note (during which the narrator speaks in a repressed monotone), which the chorus (and the narrator’s sudden confession of love/obsession) breaks wide open. Harmony and melody are closely related to form, and a good writer/composer will use those pieces to inform the structure of the piece, and vice versa. Sufjan Stevens’ ‘All Delighted People’ is a great example of a large structure pulled out of very simple melodies and harmonies. Beethoven’s 5th is so famous in part because he constructs a massive (for the time) symphony out of the first four notes. -T: Timbre (pronounced tam-burr): In art terms, this is the “color” of the sound. This is what the vast majority of people listen to when they listen to music. The easiest way to describe this is to imagine the sound of two different voices singing the same note. The difference is one of timbre. One person’s voice might be raspy and the other’s is pure. A male voice might have to strain for a high note while a female voice singing the same note is relaxed. That's all timbre. We fall in love with certain voices because of their timbre. Guitar distortion is also an example of timbre, as is the difference in tone quality between a professional and a beginner. Jack Johnson’s “It’s All Understood” uses two different snare drums—one in the verses and another in the chorus—and the slight difference in timbre creates a subtle change in mood. Because it’s easy to hear, people often attach parts of their identity and tribal signaling into timbre. When Bob Dylan went electric, timbre is what pissed people off. It didn't sound like folk music anymore. He was singing about the same subjects, with the same forms, harmonies, and melodies as before, but suddenly his timbre had changed. -T: Texture: This refers to the differences in how the parts overlap. Are they all moving together, are they in a relay, are they all doing different things at once, or are they repeating each other? Taking away and adding parts are also variations in texture. When “the beat drops,” that's actually a texture thing, not a rhythm thing. The different styles of dance music usually focus more on changing textures than anything else. For some simple examples of layering to create different textures, I would have you compare Cake, MGMT, and Sylvan Esso, each of whom uses completely different timbres but similar approaches to texture layering. Text is also an important consideration in a song, but it’s extra-musical, so I won't get into it except to say that a good songwriter/composer will write the music to support the text, and will either write or choose a good text to begin with. When I get excited about an artist, it's usually because they’re combining two or more of these in a unique way. Big Thief often has stripped-down melodies (pitch) of only one or two notes that combine with Adrianne Lenker’s raw voice (timbre) and dissonant, distorted guitar (pitch and timbre) to create a powerful emotional punch when she finally opens up. Sufjan Stevens combines minimalist melodies with dissonance and unexpected rhythms to build up massive textures and forms. When I can't stand an artist, it's usually because they are falling back on tired cliches, like moving the pitch up a half step (a modulation, in musical parlance). It's not that those cliches are inherently bad, just that they aren't a substitute for actual creativity. In some cases, its because they are breaking expectations in a way that doesn’t make any sense, like when Kenny G plays the wrong notes (for a fun read, here’s Pat Metheny’s brutal take on Kenny G). Even technically skilled musicians can be super boring if they never do anything unusual, like the glut of amateur blues guitarists at your local county fair, or in my opinion, Michael Bublé (who also can't swing to save his life, but that's because he's a pop artist, not a jazz singer, and that’s okay because he’s singing for a different audience). Meanwhile, masters of craft like Beck and Fiona Apple can make huge leaps outside of your expectations that feel inevitable within their self-contained universes. And of course, this multifaceted approach to listening is why so many musicians who have studied for several years become attracted to classical and jazz: we’re looking for things that will surprise us, and only the rarest of pop music can do that. End of lecture. I'll now take your questions and comments. July 25, 2016 Mile 549.0-565.1 16.1 Miles I am resentful. I was ready to sleep to the end of the universe, but instead my alarm has woken me at 4:30am again. I briefly consider rolling over and going back to sleep, but first I need water. A dry wind cools an otherwise warm morning; when it isn’t blowing, sweat percolates up through my skin. As cool water runs down my throat, my mind comes online, and the bitterness of being awakened is replaced by the realization that I can make it to town today. I step outside to empty my bladder and something scurries at the edge of my light’s beam. When I come back and start to pack up I see a kangaroo rat sitting on his haunches next to my tent. He quickly bounces away. I start my packing routine but he’s back in seconds, trying to jump in through the unzipped door of my tent. Bold fellow. Cute, too. I’m sure he smells my food. I shoo him away, once, twice, then zip up the door of my tent to finish packing. When I finish he’s right there, always hopping at a safe distance. I strap up and look around for the trail. In the dark with all of the fallen logs around I can't tell where it is. I was so tired last night that I don't even remember from what direction I left the trail. I pull out my phone and check the GPS with a bit of chagrin; self-reliant I am not. As it turns out, I’ve camped in a spot where the trail surrounds me in every direction but East. I start walking in a direction that I think is North, and step back onto the trail. Even in this pre-dawn darkness, I can see smoke smeared across the eastern sky, lit from below by the pink-orange lights of the town of Mojave. It permeates the air with a pungent, stinging taste. Later I will learn that the fire burned over forty-one thousand acres, destroyed eighteen buildings, and killed two people. I hike downhill, through a pipe gate where a line of windmills stand guard. Their red blinking lights illuminate my path. There is wind here, but the windmills stand still except for one, which creaks like an old swing set as it rocks slowly. An orange dawn begins, creeping into the black smudges of smoke. I hike down to a road where a post bears the names and phone numbers of thirty trail angels who are willing to come pick me up and give me a ride to town. That there are so many people willing to selflessly help us hikers warms my heart. I take a picture because there's another road in seven miles and I should get those miles done while I still have a cool morning to hike. Across the road is the sort of display usually found at those flat half-mile nature walks intended to include young children and the elderly. The displays are tilted posters mounted behind plexiglass at waist level, but instead of identifying species of bird and rodent, they identify the different types of windmill. I'm curious and have nowhere else to be, so I stand and read all four displays. I learn where the windfarm sends its power, which types of windmill are most efficient, and some of the history behind wind farming. One of the displays talks about the PCT, and I imagine I’m a tourist learning about it for the first time. I look south and imagine the Mexican border. Memories come flooding in. I look north to Canada. Imagination and memories are intermingled. Still so much to see. I imagine watching myself walk over the hills. What would I think, if I didn’t know about the PCT yet? Hobo? Pilgrim? I’d probably wonder why someone put a trail through the middle of a windfarm in the desert, and why anyone would want to hike it instead of the more beautiful mountains up north. If it weren’t part of the PCT, I probably would never have chosen to hike here, but I’m glad I'm here experiencing something different and learning the realities of how wilderness and civilization are intermingled. It gives me a sense of freedom to hike through civilized places, and it helps me see how a mountain lion or a coyote might experience their habitat. I hike away from the displays and forget most of what I read within a few steps. The tall dead grass is littered with plastic bags and bottles. I pass amongst a hodgepodge of different windmills and all I can remember is which ones are old models and which ones are newer. I climb a rise and disappear into the rolling hills. It feels like I am walking through someone’s backyard. It's all pasture land, but it’s divided into small parcels and there are farmhouses just a few hundred feet away. I imagine a family eating breakfast inside, looking out to see a hiker walking through their property. What was it like two months ago, when hundreds of hikers were coming through every day? I wonder whether the families knew what they were signing up for when they agreed to let the trail pass through. After several of these farms, I enter public land again. It’s easy to tell, because the grass is no longer green and chewed short. Long golden grasses cover the hillside and nearly obscure the trail. The heat is rising. I start a series of barren switchbacks down towards a freeway. Two men are walking the switchbacks below me. It takes me about twenty minutes to catch up.
“Good morning!” I say. “Oh, good morning.” They haven’t seen me coming. They have white hair, cut short under their trucker caps. One of them asks “Are you hiking the Pacific Crest Trail?” “Yeah.” “The whole thing?” “I’m hoping to. At least that’s the plan.” “Aren’t you kind of late? Are you gonna make it to Canada?” “I had to jump around a bit. I've already done a couple hundred miles ahead of this.” “Oh, good.” I’m not sure what else to say, so I’m getting ready to wish them a good hike and head on when he says “Are you going into town? Do you need a ride?” They drop me off at a Dennys on the edge of the town. I’ve been craving eggs and it’s 11:30 on a Monday; not many other places I'll be able to get eggs. The hostess makes leave my backpack in the foyer. I sit with my coffee and a book near the window and watch every person who goes by to make sure they aren't carrying my backpack away. I recognize it as a silly fear, but that's everything I own right now: shelter, food, clothing, bedding. I eat two breakfasts. I’m dreading going back out in this heat, so I decide to get a motel room. It's a long walk on pavement into the main part of Tehachapi. Longer than I expected, at least; long walks are all relative now. By the time I arrive I am a sweaty mess again. The town is lopsided: downtown is three or four blocks of a main street that runs east/west, and nearly all of the houses are on the south side. There’s not a soul around, maybe because it's over a hundred degrees, maybe because it’s Monday afternoon. Not even cars driving by. I find a motel near the two-feature movie theater, but no one answers the bell. Is this town abandoned? I find another motel on the south side of town, close to a park. This time someone answers. The proprietor checks me out a room and gives me a hiker discount, then asks me to make sure I clean up after myself. “And no drugs,” she says. I assure her that there will be no drugs. I spend the afternoon enjoying the freedom of no more miles. I watch a movie—I am the only one in the theater—then I pick up a six pack of beer and go back to my hotel room to clean up and call Lindsey from an air conditioned room. I’m feeling a little guilty about being off the trail so soon, but mostly I feel relieved to be out of the heat. July 24, 2016 Mile 529.3-549.0 19.7 Miles My alarm wakes me at 4:30am. Waking feels like clawing my way to the surface from deep underwater. My eyes are dry, my mouth is dry, a deep aching radiates from somewhere behind my eyes, and all I want to do is go back to sleep. But I am in the desert in late July, and this is the coolest part of the day. If I ever want to finish the desert, I need to hike now. I sit up and take a long drink from my platypus. I set out about fifteen minutes later. The stars are still out, but the sky is hinting at dawn. I can just make out the silhouettes of Joshua Trees and manzanita along the road’s edges. After a few minutes of hiking, the pain in my head begins to clear. Probably dehydration, I think. I need to be careful about drinking enough today. Constellations of red lights blink in synchronization to the northeast. Each light marks a massive turbine in the Tehachapi wind farm. I think, “That is where I am going.” I look around at the enormous plain, and all of the other possible places I could be going. None of them seem any more interesting than the wind farm, so I decide to keep going. The sky lightens slowly. The road drops down into the floor of the desert so I can’t see beyond the dirt walls that reach just above my head. Side roads, when they appear, make me want to go explore. I am a rat in a maze. Or a labyrinth? Minotaur dreams surface to consciousness. Finally it is light, and I find a game trail parallel to the road. It gets me out above the road and gives me a view of the morning desert. After about a mile it turns north, away from the road, and I'm forced to abandon it in favor of the official route. After a junction, the trail follows a manicured gravel road north through a forest of complex, Seussian Joshua trees, headed for the windfarm and the mountains behind. I stop for breakfast in the shade of a monstrous tree. It is a round, tangled swarm of spiny branches, but they completely blot out the sun and the ground beneath is flat and clear. As I force down oatmeal that is entirely too hot for this weather and wash it down with warm water, I realize that I haven’t seen or heard a single vehicle all morning. Or any other sign of humans, for that matter, aside from a couple of fences and these roads. For all I know, the apocalypse might have happened overnight, and I might be the only human remaining on the earth. I am delighted with the totality of my solitude and I’m also suddenly very lonely. The next hours heat up rapidly. A bridge passes over the dry bed of cottonwood creek. The water report tells me there is a faucet here, but it is off. I am directed to traverse a slope down to the creek where there may be a small amount of water downstream from the bridge. I still have some water left, but it’s not a lot. The next source is the last for a while, and it could be dry, so I really need there to be water here. I climb down a sandy bank where I see several other footprints. Who knows how long ago these were left, or whether they found any water. We're all following the same water report, and the last update was three weeks ago. I get to the bottom, and the creek is bone dry. I check the report again, just to make sure I didn't miss something. It says I should head downstream a hundred yards or so. I don't quite understand how there would be water a hundred yards downstream from a place where there is no water, but I decide to follow the directions anyway. I continue down and around the scattered bushes, and lo and behold, there is a tiny stream of water that seems to come out of nowhere. I drink as much of my hot leftover water as I can and sit down to filter. There is no shade nearby, so I just sit in the full blast of the sun. The heat has sapped all of my energy already, and certain parts of my brain have shut down to save energy, so I just sit and squeeze water through my filter, and stare—a thousand yard stare that goes nowhere and means nothing. The trail rejoins the aqueduct. Or is this a different branch? The aqueduct disappears and reappears under hills that the road stays above. Uphill. No shade. Downhill. No shade. A steady, tired, draining rhythm. Even the bottoms of my feet feel hot. I reach the wind farm. A hundred or more triple-bladed giants shred the sky into pieces above me. Every downwards slice of their scythes feels like it is aimed directly at me and I am walking beneath a living, malicious chandelier of Damocles. What would Don Quixote have made of these monsters? A latticework of dirt roads connects the towering windmills, but for the first time in over twenty miles, the trail becomes a single-track again, eschewing the roads for a more direct route toward the mountains. A single small building sits off to the east, just below one of the windmills. The guidebook tells me that the workers there sometimes provide hikers with water and soda, but there are no vehicles parked outside and it’s a quarter mile out of the way, so I decide to forge onward, into the mountains. The trail finally leaves the desert floor and climbs up an exposed south-facing slope. The temperature is surely over a hundred degrees by now, but I have no way to check. I come around a corner and drop down into Tylerhorse Canyon. There is flowing water here! And good thing, because I am going through my water faster than I imagined. I am already down to half a liter. Someone has built a small rock dam to pool the water and make it easier to fill bottles, and there is even a shady tree nearby. I take off my shirt and dip it in the water to cool myself, then sit in the shade to devour my food and water. When I start the climb out of the canyon, I don't feel well. I am heavy with food and water that my body doesn't want to digest, my muscles are raging at me for the continuous abuse, my head is aching again, and the heat is persistently leaching away what little energy I have left. I realize that I barely slept last night and that I never intended to hike through this part of the day. Somehow I forgot that and just kept going. I stop to take a nap under a squat Joshua tree. I lay on my pad for an hour or more, shifting every fifteen minutes or so to get back under the imperfect shade and brushing off carpenter ants, the only living creatures I've seen all day. I am unable to sleep, but my headache subsides and my food digests, so I continue on. Up and over a mountain where I find a water cache and some plastic chairs that someone has left for hikers. I sign and read the register; it appears that the last person came through here two days ago, and someone else four days before that. The trail drops down into a steep canyon. I can see all the switchbacks up the other side, and I groan. Down, down, down. Up, up, up, up, up. I am no longer a human being, I am a walking factory. I am a lifeless assembly line that produces cheap plastic footsteps, one after another after another, with no concern for quality or consistency.
The miles disappear in a ruinous waste of disintegrated desert and fire-scarred Joshua tree stumps. When the day finally cools and I find a campsite, it is apocalyptic. There have been big hardwood trees here, but that was eons ago. They have been flayed—bare of leaves, branches, even bark. Their skeletons were toppled and left to petrify for unknown ages. I pitch my tent, so drained that all I want is to lie down to be petrified and sleep with them until some unimagined future beyond the age of man when we may all arise together and witness the end of the universe. July 23, 2016 Mile 517.6-529.3 11.7 miles Two days off, and I’m itching to get back on the trail. The first day was the trip back to the car and a lovely afternoon/evening with my Uncle and Aunt. The second day was a trip back to San Rafael, Lindsey’s parents’ home, so Lindsey could pick up our dog Deuce before she goes home to Santa Maria. We’re driving south on interstate 5, near Tejon Ranch, when Lindsey’s mom calls to tell us that she just heard there’s a huge fire. She thinks it's near where Lindsey is going to drop me off. I check the news on my phone, and she’s right, it looks very close to Agua Dulce. The road to get there is closed. Even if we were to find a way through, it's probably going to be smoky as hell. If the trail has taught me anything so far, it’s to be flexible, so I check the maps for the next place that's likely to be out of the danger zone and out of the smoke. Hikertown and the dreaded aqueduct. Hikers love to complain about the flat monotony of the hike along the LA Aqueduct, but I'm actually looking forward to it. Ever since I did a paper on Roman Polanski’s Chinatown in college, I’ve been fascinated by the history of California water politics. It's also a perfect place to night-hike, or so I've been told. It does seem a little stupid to try to hike this section of the desert in the daytime, especially in late July. I store the PCT water report on my phone—there are a lot of miles between sources, and some of them sound like they’re drying up. I'm going to have to haul a lot of water, just in case. We pass hikertown on a small two-lane highway and go another 5 miles or so to a store where we pick up a couple gallons of water to fill my bottles. Then we drive back and Lindsey pulls over to the side of the road. We embrace as a truck screams by. “I’m going to miss you,” she says. “Me too. I’ll see you in a week, though.” We have planned a week off-trail for her dad’s surprise 70th birthday party and to go to the Outsidelands festival in San Francisco. “You’re just going to hike through the night?” The sun is only a couple hours from the horizon. The air is hot and dry. “We’ll see. I’ll go until I feel tired. I love you.” “I love you too. Be safe out there.” She drives away, and I feel that strange mix of excitement and loneliness that always accompanies a trailhead drop-off. I climb a hill onto private property. To the west a coyote is on a quest of her own, a sepia cutout in a golden field of dry grass. I stop to take a picture, and she stops to look at me. I start moving again, and she resumes too. I check my photo and realize it didn’t turn out. I stop to take another, and she stops too. We are at least 200 yards apart, but she must be able to hear my footsteps. Two lone travelers sizing each other up, each on their own quest. It feels like a spirit animal moment. A gate, then I’m walking along a cul-de-sac. The houses have collected the detritus of decades of mechanical work. A trail blaze at the end of the road marks a small path through the weeds and up to the side of the aqueduct, which forces the trail to a hard right. It’s open here, like a river with steep cement banks. I follow it for about a mile to the east, then cut north on a dirt road that extends in a straight line about as far as the eye can follow it up to the mountains on the horizon. A large black pipe is sunk into an earthwork above the road. I try to follow it for a while, but the footing is uncomfortable and I move back down to the road instead. I am surrounded on all sides by barren desert except for a house with a couple of workshops that I slowly work my way towards. As I pass by, a pack of dogs greets me with exuberant barking through a chain link fence. I imagine droves of hikers coming through here and setting off the dogs every few minutes and I have to wonder what the owners must feel about us. Shortly after, a truck comes down the road. I am a little fearful, out here by myself at dusk. As they approach, they start to slow. Will they kidnap me? Murder me? Beat me to a pulp as a representative of all the PCT hikers that intrude on their desolate lands? The dusk brings out my worst fears. The truck stops beside me. Two tough-looking guys in their thirties stare out at me. I smile as pleasantly as I can, bracing inside for the inevitable hostility. The driver says “you hiking the PCT?” in a gruff voice.
“Yeah,” I say, trying to sound casual. “Do you need any water?” My fear deflates like a pierced balloon. “Oh, thanks, but I just got dropped off a couple miles back and I’m completely full.” “Okay then, good luck.” And they speed off down the road, kicking up a plume of dust that I can see for miles. The sun drops through a gap in the mountains like a quarter into a slot. The game begins. Level one: how long can I hike without turning on my headlamp? The long straight road gradually forks and I take the right fork. It joins up with and follows a different section of the aqueduct. This one is underground, covered by flat concrete not much different from a road. The small difference is in the raised boxes that appear every quarter mile or so in the center of the concrete. The dusk deepens. I navigate by light that pales gradually to the cool white of starlight and moonlight. As the world in front of me shrinks to a few feet, the world above me opens wide. The distant lights of a town to the east feel intimately close. The stars are friendly, companionable. The hard concrete of the aqueduct begins to tax my feet, so I move off of it and onto the dirt road beside. I occasionally hear scratching or rustling off the sides of the road, but I am unperturbed. The desert creatures are living their lives, and it is a privilege to experience their rituals. Joshua trees hold pentecostal poses against the midnight blue sky and I feel I am in a holy place. I am surprised to find that hiking at night is not the frightful experience I had imagined it to be. I am peaceful, sufficient to myself. After an hour or two alone with my thoughts and the friendly night-creatures, the sound of an engine slowly surfaces the threshold of awareness. I turn to see headlights in the distance. I move off of the road and onto the aqueduct and continue walking, headlight still off. As the engine crescendoes, I turn again to watch it approach. It is moving fast. I wonder how it is able to keep such speed on a bumpy dirt road. It gets closer, and I wonder what sort of suspension keeps it from bouncing around. It's unnerving to see those headlights bearing down almost right at me in this expanse of darkness. The engine is roaring now and I can hear the distorted music blasting from inside; is that Skynard? With a start, I realize those headlights aren’t going to pass me by; the truck is on the aqueduct! My body registers the thought before my brain, and I am already in motion trying to force my pack, obese with days of food and water, into sufficient momentum to get off the aqueduct in time. The truck closes fifteen feet in the time I accomplish the first step, then another fifteen as I lean into the second. Seconds stretch long but my muscles can't get ahead of them. I hit the bushes in the same instant that the truck speeds by. Dry thorns and branches stick into my legs and I’m still stumbling after the red glow of the taillights fades into darkness. The truck doesn't slow until a quarter mile down the road, where it swerves to avoid the next box in the aqueduct. Alone in the dark again, I step back onto the concrete and brush the thorns and branches off of my pants. I have reached my limits at level one. Level two. I turn my headlamp to the red light setting. I can preserve my night vision and still have the focus of a little extra visibility. My nerves are a little frazzled, and viewing the world in bloody red isn’t helping. The scratching and rustling around me take on more sinister overtones. I steel myself against the dark, rigid and hyperalert. I crunch along the dirt road for a while this way until I hear something moving on the road ahead of me, just beyond my headlamp. The footsteps sound like a big animal, and maybe more than one. I freeze and listen, staring into impenetrable darkness. I turn my headlamp to white, and squint into the darkness. Two sets of eyes burn directly back at me. They are wide-set eyes, like the head of a great beast. My rational mind tells me cow, or maybe bull, but my primitive self is screaming Minotaur! Giant! I shout, and nothing happens. I shout again and stomp on the ground and the animals run a short ways back. I walk forward cautiously, worried that they might charge in fear or self-defense. My advancing light uncovers a fresh cow-turd. It looks like I scared the shit out of one of them. A few more steps, and the eyes burn back at me again. I shout and stomp again, and this time they run at an angle and off the road. I stay to the other side of the road and pass around them, hurrying to avoid another confrontation. Another hour of tense walking takes its toll on my body and my nerves, and I start to look for a place to sleep. It's around one in the morning now, and I’ll need to wake up early if I want to avoid hiking in the hot parts of the day. I finally find a spot nestled behind a couple of bushes off of an oblique junction with another dirt road. I set up in the dark and fall into a restless sleep. An engine roars towards me and I jolt upright in my sleeping bag. Headlights are aimed right at my tent and they're coming fast! “Oh Shit! Look out!” I yell it as loud as I can. I am going to die in this instant, a violent and terrible death. I put my arms up in front of my face in absolute terror, certain that my next moment will be painful and short. The lights swing away and past me down the road, bouncing as they go. I make a note to myself: don’t set up camp right next to an intersection, even on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. I try to calm myself and go back to sleep, but it’s a while before my heart slows enough to even think of sleep, and even when I finally nod off, my dreams are full of monsters and violent car accidents. July 20, 2016 Mile 923.1-942.5 19.4 Miles In reading these posts, Lindsey tells me she comes across as a buzzkill who hardly says anything. That comes from my lack of skill as a writer, not from any buzzkillery on her part. I am still a novice at writing about other people and reconstructing dialogue. She has always been patient--indulgent, even--with my boyish enthusiasm for big ideas and hiking, and I am always grateful for her companionship. I think that’s important to note before I write about this day, in particular, when my enthusiasm for hiking (and my desire for food) led me to push her too hard. I wake in the middle of the night to a full moon rising over the eastern wall of the basin. I leave the tent and have a look around. Banner Peak, Thousand Island Lake, the whole granite bowl—everything is incandescent silver. The lake is frosted glass. A few stars shine beside the moon like jewels in the night. I feel as if we're on another planet or in another dimension. How many nights like this do we lose in our city boxes? As we block out the mosquitoes and insulate ourselves from the cold with thick walls, we also blindfold ourselves to the world. We distract ourselves from the loss by pursuing trinkets and status instead. What is it for? Do we hope that we’ll be able to trade those for something that will give us solace? It’s a fool’s trade. Trinkets and status will only buy you more of the same. I can skip it. Give me the wild, undiluted, direct experience of life. I drink the vision until I am full, then I return to the tent and sink into a deep sleep. We wake to a brisk morning, like late fall in the midwest. The sun has already hit Banner Peak, but it hasn't yet reached us. We race to pack up camp; the pace helps to stoke our inner furnaces, but there’s no keeping the chill off our skin. The morning climb is tough, but enjoyable. We stop several times to soak up nature's greatest hits: the first warming sunlight on our skin, the glint of tarns, the cleansing sounds of rushing streams, the butterscotch scent of pine trees baking in the sun. The tarns hold a particular magic; miniature rock islands are decorated with twisted bonsai trees like a zen garden. We stop just beyond Island pass for breakfast. I look for a place to use the bathroom, but there is water flowing through nearly every crack and gully. It takes me a few minutes to find a place that is sufficiently far from water. On the way back, I stop to watch where a small stream tumbles into another and trace the maze-like path of their combined waters downhill with my eyes. How long must these streams have been here to carve the granite like this? Over a hill and down, we get a view of the range where we are headed. Lindsey points out a low spot: "is that the pass?” “No, I think it’s over there.” I point further to the left, where my memory tells me it should be. Over the next hour, it becomes obvious that the trail is headed directly to where Lindsey pointed. I admit my error. We climb up to an alpine basin, then start up the final switchbacks to the pass. We stop to talk to a couple of hikers on their way down, who tell us that the best view from the pass is a little to the west of the trail. We thank them for the info and continue on our way. It’s tough hiking, and fully exposed to the sun, but we’re in good spirits all the way to the top. As long as there's a view to look forward to, the difficulty can’t touch our good mood. There are about fifteen people at the top, all of them right next to the trail. Lindsey and I use our insider information and step off the trail to explore to the west. We do find a slightly better view. Lyell Canyon is a grassy carpet unrolled in a long curve to the northwest; the Lyell Fork of the Tuolomne River meanders in curlicues along its center like an artist’s doodle. There’s also a steady supply of snowmelt to filter and drink, so we stop for lunch and refill our bottles from the source of the river below I check the map on my phone. “Only about 12 more miles to Tuolomne Meadows. We could make that before 5.” “Yeah, I guess so,” Lindsey says. She’s reticent. “The grill has veggie burgers,” I entice her. “Let’s see how it goes. I don't want to rush it.” She's open to the idea, and I take that as a victory. Now that veggie burgers are on the table, I’m ready to go as soon as we finish eating. Lindsey feels the unspoken pressure and she packs up too. We start a winding descent through rock fields. Much of our foot placement is along the larger rocks that define the edges of the trail, because the trail itself has become a small creek running steeply downhill. I look for a copse of trees where Brian and I waited out a hailstorm. I think I find it, but everything looks different than my memory. We continue among two lakes with the signature murky blue of glacial runoff (the Lyell glacier that sits above them is one of the southernmost glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere. It is on its last leg and may have even been downgraded to snowfield by this point). Another steep downhill takes us down to the river created by the lakes’ outlets, and we cross on large stepping stones that have been deliberately placed. The next section takes us through a garden-like collection of flowers, shrubs, and scattered trees. Water seems to flow everywhere through them. We eventually make our way to a bridge, where a lady signals to us to stay quiet. As we approach her and the bridge, she whispers to us that there's a deer lying down on an island next to the bridge. We cross quietly and look over at the halfway point. The island is small and covered with bushes, and it comes right down to the center post of the bridge. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the dark shadows, but when they do, there she is, just as promised: a doe, curled up and looking right back at us, only a few feet away. She watches us warily but stays put. Her fearful eyes fill me with compassion, and we move off the bridge so as not to disturb her further. The climb down the rest of the pass seems much longer than I remember, and by the bottom, we’re both tired. But now we’ve hit the flat meadow of Lyell Canyon, and food is just ahead, just 8 more miles of flat dirt track through the meadow. In my eagerness I take the lead, which is a mistake. A good rule of thumb when hiking with others is that the slower hiker goes in front and sets the pace. When the faster hiker is in front, he or she will naturally move ahead and have to constantly stop and wait. The slower hiker will either try to hike faster than they are comfortable, or they will fall behind. Sometimes both. And both are frustrating. Of course, I don’t always want to hike in back, especially on a steep uphill, so sometimes we agree that I’ll hike ahead for a while and wait for her at the top. On this long flat meadow, though, we've made no such agreement, so Lindsey is trying to keep up with my pace, which has opened up considerably on the easy terrain. The leader is also the one who can most easily call for a break. I don't need a break, and it doesn't even occur to me to take one. We speed onward with long strides and I'm feeling the endorphins. I'm cheery and upbeat. We pass a group of trail workers cutting boulders and setting them in the trail. I chat with them as we pass by, and that’s when I realize that Lindsey is especially quiet. She doesn’t look happy. I try to bolster her spirits with the promise of real food.
“Only a couple more miles. It's gonna be close, but we can totally make it in time.” The look on her face tells me I've said something very wrong. I try again. “You’re doing great. That veggie burger is going to be so good!” Her silence is worse than any shouting match. I concede the point and we slow down. It doesn't seem to help. We walk the last two miles in a cold silence, speaking only when necessary. It's only after we reach the campground and walk the last quarter mile to the store that we start to talk it out. As often happens, my eagerness took her out of her comfort zone, and I was blind to it until it was too late. I apologize, and things are better. The grill is still open when we arrive a couple minute before five. There's still a big line, so it looks like they won't be closing yet. We go into the store to pick up my resupply for the next section—they’re supposed to close at five too. The worker climbs up on the desk and pulls down my box from a cubbyhole, then he gives me a lecture about the fact that I'm two weeks late to pick up my box, and they almost threw it away. It's not something I had thought of, and I'm grateful they held on to it, but I also feel like I’m doing everything wrong today and I'm not thrilled about the lecture. I’m polite and thank him for the box: next time I'll be more careful. We go back outside to get in line for food, and there’s an employee at the end of the line telling people that he’s the end of the line and they won't be serving anyone else. The store shows no sign of closing. I’ve made the wrong choice, and now we’ve missed our chance for a real cooked meal. I just want to cry. I expect Lindsey to be mad again, but maybe because she can tell just how dejected I am, she seems more sympathetic than upset. We go back to the campground and find ourselves a spot that we share with a father and his two kids. We cook a rehydrated meal and chat until the sun goes down, then Lindsey and I retreat into the tent and talk a little more about our plans. We've decided not to hike down to the Valley; she doesn't want to hike tomorrow, and it’s not part of the PCT, so I don’t mind skipping it. Instead, we’ll take the bus, pick up the car, and go stay a night with my Uncle and Aunt near Coarsegold, then she'll take me down to Agua Dulce so I can complete the section that I skipped. Tomorrow we’ll have some real food. Last weekend I drove out to the Emigrant Wilderness for a quick solo trip.
Itinerary: I started from the Crabtree trailhead at about 5am Saturday morning, hiked northeast to Chewing Gum Lake (breakfast), across Whiteside Meadow, over a ridge and down to Salt Lick Meadow, then out to Long Lake (lunch), where I explored an off-trail route down to Deer Lake. From there I cut due East to the Buck Lakes, then south to Wood Lake (one of my new favorites), and then West along Buck Meadow Creek. I camped a little south of Piute Camp lookout, then departed about 6am the next morning, had a couple of cows feint at me when I hiked too close, and made it back to the car about 9am, untrampled and hungry. |
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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